In many emergency situations it is of great importance to be able to quickly and accurately locate individuals. For example, in the event of a vehicular accident, public safety personnel may need to operate within an unfamiliar wooded area on short notice, in conditions of poor visibility due to smoke, flame or darkness. Accurate location information is vital to coordinate rescue operations and ensure the safety of rescue personnel. Police or military personnel may be faced with similar circumstances, in which accurate and timely location information can help avoid friendly-fire incidents and coordinate action against a criminal or enemy force.
Individuals faced with an emergency involving immediate danger to life or health of themselves or a colleague need to be able to accurately provide their location to emergency/rescue personnel, preferably without human intervention to enable rescue in the case where the individual in need is incapacitated, or all attention must be devoted to his/her protection. In all these circumstances, rapid and automated acquisition of the location of an individual to within a few meters can be critical in saving lives.
In addition, there are times when an individual or an object is in a rural area needs to be located in an emergency. A mobile device an individual may be carrying may not be able to communicate because of poor signal strength to the mobile device in the rural area.
Prior art methods of accomplishing such location do not simultaneously meet the requirements of rapid location determination, automation, and accuracy. Navigation employing conventional maps and visual observation or dead reckoning are not readily automated and thus require time and attention by a human observer. Manual navigation may be vitiated in the case where visibility is impacted by flame or smoke, or where personnel are under hostile fire and unable to establish their location by patient observation.
Enhanced 911, (E911) is a location technology that enables mobile, or cellular phones and other mobile device such personal digital/data assistants (PDAs) to process 911 emergency calls and enable emergency services to locate a physical geographic position of the device and thus the caller. When a person makes a 911 call using a traditional phone with wires, the call is routed to the appropriate public safety answering point (PSAP) that then distributes the emergency call to the proper emergency services. The PSAP receives the caller's phone number and the exact location of the phone from which the call was made. Prior to 1996, 911 callers using a mobile phone would have to access their service providers in order to get verification of subscription service before the call was routed to a PSAP. In 1996 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that a 911 call must go directly to the PSAP without receiving verification of service from a specific cellular service provider. The call must be handled by any available service carrier even if it is not the cellular phone customer's specific carrier.
The FCC has rolled out E911 in two phases. In 1998, Phase I required that mobile phone carriers identify the originating call's phone number and the location of the signal tower, or cell. In 2001, Phase II required that each mobile phone company doing business in the United States must offer either handset- or network-based location detection capability so that the caller's location is determined by the geographic location of the cellular phone within 100 meter accuracy and not the location of the tower that is transmitting its signal. The FCC refers to this as Automatic Location Identification (ALI).
In addition to traditional cellular telephones, advances in technology have expanded the number and types of devices that are capable of initiating an emergency call for service that is routed to the appropriate PSAP based on the caller's location. Devices include, but are not limited to: computer programs that are executed on computing devices (Soft Phone), cellular telephones that are capable of data communications, wearable embedded devices, devices embedded into home appliances, intelligent building control and monitoring systems, and intelligent roadways. The concept of an “Internet of Things” will allow any connected device to initiate communications with another device, service, or person, including a system within a PSAP.
In the current 9-1-1 operating environment, telecommunication carriers and hosted service providers (i.e., dial tone providers) associate an end point device (e.g., a non-mobile telephone) with a static location at the time of provisioning. This location is used by the dial tone provider to determine the location appropriate 9-1-1 call center or Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) that is responsible for answering and handling a 9-1-1 call made from the end point device.
Typically, the dial tone provider will use a third party to route and deliver both the 9-1-1 call and the associated Automatic Location Information (ALI). In the event the end point device is moved from the location it was provisioned with (e.g., into a new office, etc.), the end user is responsible to update the static location.
This is accomplished in several manners including submitting a service order to the dial tone provider, accessing and updating the static location through a web portal, or using a client application on the static end point device to update the portal. However, the problem with all of these methods is that they are all manual processes. In addition, if the static location of the end point device is not updated, in the event of any emergency situation, the end point device would not provide the correct emergency location when a 9-1-1 call is made. This endangers the health and safety of the caller.
As the 9-1-1/text-to-911 operating environment moves away from statically located devices such as non-mobile phones and allows users the ability to move their mobile end point devices, such as mobile phones, electronic tablets, wearable devices, etc. at will, there is a need for an associated automatic current physical location discovery and 9-1-1 location database update capability to locate such mobile and non-mobile, but moveable devices when an emergency event occurs.